Wood anomaly transmission enhancement in fishnet-based metamaterials at terahertz frequencies

On the basis of a fishnet-like structure, we analyze a metamaterial design involving dimer aperture arrays. It is shown that this approach leads to very strong Fano resonances within the transmission spectrum. The role of the Wood anomaly in the enhancement of the magnetic field is pointed out in order to explain this transmission characteristic. A sensitivity numerical analysis of this resonant feature is carried out. A figure of merit, defined as the ratio between the sensitivity and the width at half maximum of the resonance, as high as 830, is obtained. To our knowledge, this value is greater than the ones reported so far in literature using the inter-particle electromagnetic induced transparency principle. This property is of great interest for environment control applications, especially for sensing of highly diluted media, such as gaseous phase pollutants, as a complement to conventional spectroscopy techniques. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4769744]